Various terminals such as PCs (Personal Computers) have employed, for example, Ethernet (trade mark) for communications. These terminals need to be held in an active state all the time because it is unknown when a communication frame will arrive. Meanwhile, a recent increasingly growing trend to reduce power consumption has led to a number of attempts to reduce power consumption on those terminals. For example, there has arisen a technique which allows for selecting between an active state in which power is supplied to the entire terminal and a low-power state in which power is supplied only to a section of the terminal responsible for communications to monitor a frame for transition to an active-state.
However, such a technique as mentioned above cannot reduce power consumption in the section responsible for communications because power is still supplied to that section.